Sunday, August 5, 2012

School Jumper

It’s time that I release this to the public.

About the development

The game was made for my school’s final exam or finals. I had to create something that would show what I learned in the past 4 years in IT. So naturally I decided to make a game, because I love to make them.

I’m not sure how long it took me to develop the game, since I don’t track the time I spend on something anymore. But I will say about a month to two of passive development. Meaning I was on and off the project. The total lines of code is around 2000, but that’s just numbers, it doesn’t matter.

I lost interest in the development really fast with this one, because it wasn’t really something I wanted to make, I just had to make it and I wanted to make it really simple. So I just went for a simple platformer.

But the project has 2 things I never done before. First is a somewhat solid animation for the main character and the other is a much nicer level editor than any before. You still have to scroll through the objects but with a right click you get a menu, where you can nicely save, load and test the level. You still have to manually add the level in a text file if you want to use it in the main game, but I’m OK with that.

This is also the first time I used irrKlang. It’s a really solid sound library and I prefer it over FMOD for my needs. I’m not sure but maybe I also used FTGL for the first time, which is a font rendering library for OpenGL, which uses Freetype2.

The game has two download options so choose yours:

Download 1 is an setup I made for easier use. You will need administrator rights to install it and it also comes with Visual C++ Redistributable which you need to run the game.

Download 2 in a standard zip file containing the game. No setup required. You will probably prefer this one.

The source code

I also GPL-ed the code and published it on GitHub. The assets are under Creative Commons BY-SA license. So if you want to modify the game go ahead and try it out. Or just use the code for some project.